Saddam
Suddenly Looks Innocent

Memo To: Attorney
General John Ashcroft
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Why is He Being Held at All?

I see in the papers, John, that our government has decided that we will
maintain physical custody of Saddam Hussein even after the June 30 transfer
of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government. An anonymous official told
Associated Press the reason is the Iraqis do not have a prison safe enough
to hold Saddam, and I suppose there may be some concern that if the Iraqi
interim government got their hands on him there may be no need for a
“trial.” They might sooner have him “die of natural causes” in his cell
rather than have him answer the charges of war crimes, which have yet to be
brought against him. But I now wonder why he is being held at all?

If you think about it, 18 months ago Saddam Hussein was sitting in his
office, the duly constituted president and prime minister of Iraq, minding
his own business. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with
Iraq and so did not formally recognize him as head of state. But most of the
rest of the world did, and Iraq had a seat at the United Nations and in its
proper rotation could even take a seat on the Security Council. It was at
this point that President Bush decided Saddam had weapons of destruction and
was conspiring with Al Qaeda to menace peace-loving nations like the United
States. He took his assertions to the UN Security Council and the Council
agreed by a 15-to-0 vote to demand Saddam permit UN inspectors back into
Iraq to search for the WMD. If you followed the U.N. proceedings over the
following months, you will find that Baghdad fully complied with every
demand made upon it by the Security Council.

Even if you missed the TV coverage, if you read the papers carefully you
would find no instance where Saddam thumbed his nose at the Council. When he
read of accounts from President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of
State Powell that he was still hiding stuff from the inspectors that our CIA
knew about, he said he would invite the CIA to come and look in every nook
and cranny. Remember? And when the UN inspectors were given tips by the CIA
on places to search for WMD, they did so and found no traces of WMD. Not a
teensy weensy bit of evidence. So when President Bush asked the Security
Council for a resolution backing a war with Iraq, the Council turned him
down. The other members pointed out that U.N. diplomacy had indeed worked
and that the inspectors could clean up the last bits and pieces in a few
months and certify that Iraq was absolutely clean.

President Bush did have authorization from the U.S. Congress to go to war
with Iraq to get his WMD, but the resolution required that before he
committed troops he had to certify in letters to the House and Senate that
diplomacy had failed. Mr. Bush sent such letters to the House and Senate two
days before our generals led coalition troops into Iraq from Kuwait. Some
members of Congress objected, but what could they do but sit back and wait
for our troops to defeat the Iraqi army and then locate the hidden WMD?

As we now know, Saddam Hussein was telling the truth. He had no WMD, had
in fact gotten rid of them in 1991 when the U.N. passed a resolution
demanding that he do so. Well, the administration of which you are the chief
legal officer then insisted the war was justified because of Al Qaeda
connections to Saddam’s regime. We don’t need a permission slip from the
UNSC if we see there is a potential threat from a government somewhere,
anywhere, that might develop WMD and give them to Al Qaeda, who would then
sneak them into the United States and cause catastrophic loss of life. But
now we find Saddam was absolutely telling the truth that he had no contact
with Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden and that the one overture that came from Al
Qaeda to an Iraqi official several years ago, asking assistance from
Baghdad, was rebuffed. Apparently our intelligence agencies knew all this,
as the 9-11 Commission has since discovered, but the administration you
serve chose to believe otherwise. The war went forward and the mission was
accomplished, at least in its formal military phase. Estimates of the number
of Iraqi military and militiamen killed in combat range as high as 60,000
and estimates of the collateral damage to civilians range from 16,000 to
35,000 deaths.

Saddam Hussein was eventually located in his spider hole and whisked
away, put under lock and key in a secure prison, with the idea that he would
eventually be turned over to a duly constituted court of law and tried as a
war criminal. President Bush on many occasions has pointed out that Iraq is
better off without Saddam because his regime was known to have used “torture
and rape rooms” at Al Ghraib prison. Now you know President Bush did not
order our military people to use those same rooms to rape and torture Iraqi
“detainees.” He says so and I believe him. But I wonder if you have evidence
that Saddam ordered the Iraqi state or local police to “torture and rape,”
or might he also insist as Mr. Bush has that he was at the tippy top of the
national government and if he had known what excesses were committed by
local cops, he would have put a stop to it.

To tell you the truth, John, as far as I can recall, there have been no
assertions of the “brutality” of Saddam’s regime from anyone but the Iraqi
exiles associated with Ahmet Chalabi or those Kurds who fought on the
Iranian side in the Iran/Iraq war. There are all kinds of anecdotes about
Saddam doing dreadful things, entire books written about them, but the
source of all of them is the same pool of people who have been feeding faked
“evidence” of WMD and Al Qaeda connections to our government. Can it be that
there is nothing that Saddam has done all these years that cannot be
justified as the permissible acts of a head of state acting in defense of
his people. Yes, he invaded Kuwait in 1990, but in retrospect that was a
really easy war to justify, given the economic warfare being conducted
against Iraq by the Emir of Kuwait. I mean easy in relation to now having to
justify this American invasion and destruction of good chunks of Iraq, on
false premises.

President Bush still has it in his head that Saddam tried to assassinate
his father in 1993, but if you did the smallest bit of digging you would
find this was a hoax perpetrated by the neo-cons. The President also has it
in his head that Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds in 1988,
killing tens of thousands of them with poison gas and/or machine guns. If
you lifted a little pinky to get to the bottom of this story, you will find
it is also made of neo-con whole cloth. I’m not making wild assertions,
John, because I have spent countless hours on this subject and find no
loopholes left. Just call Human Rights Watch and ask if they have yet found
the mass graves of those tens of thousands of Kurds and they will sheepishly
admit they are still looking.

I’ll have to admit there is no easy way out for the Bush administration
in explaining how it could have been snookered from first to last about
Saddam Hussein. I’m not suggesting you ask to meet with the President and
tell him he should go on TV and tell the American people he made a Bigtime
Boo-Boo. I’m only suggesting you go back to your law books and, for your own
good, get a good grip on why Saddam Hussein is behind bars when it now turns
out he doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong. You might then be in a
better position to advise the President on how to proceed in the best way to
avoid further Bigtime Boo-Boos.

When last Chatterbox
looked in on Jude Wanniski, high priest of supply-side economics,
Wanniski was taking a well-deserved victory lap for having stated,
prior to the war, that Saddam didn't have any chemical or biological
weapons. The moral high ground was unfamiliar to Wanniski, at least on
this issue, because previously
he'd argued, against a
mountain of meticulous documentation to the contrary, that Saddam
Hussein never gassed the Kurds. For a brief moment, one could shed the
memory of Wanniski as genocide-denier and call him prescient.

But apparently the air up on that moral and factual summit was
too thin for him. Wanniski has now reverted to his more accustomed
role as crank with a truly appalling claim (in
a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft) that Saddam Hussein
"suddenly looks innocent."

Saddam, Wanniski argues, did not harbor weapons that threatened
other nations and did not have meaningful ties to al-Qaida. So far, so
good. But then Wanniski slips the surly bonds of earth to argue that
Saddam may not have had the vaguest clue about the atrocities being
committed in his name. If Bush didn't know about Abu Ghraib, isn't it
possible that Saddam didn't know about what his brownshirts were up
to?

I wonder if you have evidence that Saddam ordered the Iraqi state
or local police to "torture and rape," or might he also insist as Mr. Bush
has that he was at the tippy top of the national government and if he had
known what excesses were committed by local cops, he would have put a stop
to it.

This is, of course, absurd. Saddam didn't merely preside over an
absolute dictatorship that committed brutal acts; he committed some of those
acts himself. Wanniski argues that stories about Saddam's
taste for savagery come from the same discredited sources that told us
about his weapons cache. But—to take just one example—don't you think Saddam
might have wondered what happened to his
sons-in-law when, after defecting to Jordan in 1995, Saddam welcomed them
back in 1996, and they foolishly took him up on it? Are we to believe he's
been keeping Sunday dinner warm for them these past eight years, fretting
about their failure to turn up?